Mupparimanam is a romantic thriller starring Shanthnu Bhagyaraj and Srushti Dange in the lead roles. It has been written and directed by Adhiroopan who was a former assistant to director Bala. How has this romantic thriller managed to keep the audiences hooked to the screen? Read below to find out.
The film starts off with it’s nonlinear screenplay of narration like many other thrillers and has Shanthnu sporting his new tonsured and rugged look. The first few minutes keeps us interested to know what we have in store for the next 2 hours. However, once the flashback love portions start off, it slows down, and the thrilling aspect meets the speed breaker right from then on.
Shanthnu sure has worked hard to portray this role and has managed to do a good job out of what was given to him. This is slightly different from his usual chocolate boy next door image. His subtle reactions in the first half to quite an intense performance in the second, it shows his improvement as an actor. Srushti Dange who plays his love interest does not perfectly fit in as a schoolgirl, but she has some work to do in the second half, and she has done a fair job there.
Director Adhiroopan has written his second half well, but his first half lacks the essence to keep the audiences glued to the screen. Placement of songs that were not required, forced comedy scenes and Shanthanu following his love interest take over the majority time portions of the slow and draggy first half. The second half too follows the same pace, and the twists are much predictable. The core theme is also overused in many films before and it is something we have already seen.
Music by GV Prakash is definitely not his best and editing by Vivek Harshan is pretty commendable. The visuals in the song Let’s go Party, (the special number featuring numerous celebrities) is decent, but it hinders the flow of the movie. Most of the other characters do not have much to do.
Srushti’s characterisation is a space open for debate and leaves us with many doubts and questions. There are lot of intense scenes in the latter half but the problem is that we might have to wait too long a time to witness them and this is a negative, keeping in mind the attention span of the audiences these days. Skanda’s role of a film star is ordinary and lacks the spark.
Shanthnu has tried hard to bring out the shades of grey in him, and this has worked pretty well and deserves due appreciation. But apart from that and a couple of twists followed by some thrilling scenes, Mupparimanam is a normal template love story that takes a fairly different and thrilling route in the course of time.
On the whole, director Adhiroopan definitely has what it takes to make an engaging thriller film with well-written family based emotional scenes, but he has given a lot of importance to commercial aspects like love, songs, and comedy which dilutes the impact that could have been created. Also, with the majority twists kept for the last few minutes, a finish with a bang is lacking and leaves the audiences with a half baked cake